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Your First Look at Sophie Turner as Phoenix

The next installment in the long-running X-Men series, X-Men: Dark Phoenix will see the mutant heroes battling one of their own, telepath Jean Grey, when she is driven mad after being possessed by the Phoenix, an entity of nearly unlimited power.

Entertainment Weekly has the first images from next fall’s big movie, depicting star Sophie Turner (Sansa, GAME OF THRONES) as Phoenix. When she turns evil, she becomes known as Dark Phoenix.

According to director Simon Kinberg, the Phoenix force is awakened after a solar flare hits the team during a mission in space. First-time helmer Kinberg wrote and produced a number of previous X-flicks.

The source material for this story is the Dark Phoenix Saga, which ran in Uncanny X-Men #129-138, by writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne, and is considered the pinnacle of the revered Claremont/Byrne era. Phoenix herself first appeared in X-Men #101 by Claremont and artist Dave Cockrum,

If the idea of Jean Grey going crazy with power sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the Dark Phoenix Saga was butchered almost beyond recognition in the 2006 Brett Ratner film, X-Men: The Last Stand. This new movie promises to hew closer to the story as told in the comics, but casting reports suggest Kinberg is adding characters (such as Dazzler) that were not in the comics, so “closer’ to the original story is probably a relative thing.

Jean becoming Phoenix was foreshadowed at the end of X-Men: Apocalypse when [SPOILER WARNING] Jean unleashed her full powers to defeat Apocalypse and was framed by an aura of fire in the shape of a Phoenix. [END SPOILER WARNING] In the comics, the Dark Phoenix storyline happened decades before Apocalypse came along.